There’s a lot of excitement around the potential for the widespread adoption of solid-state drives (SSD) for primary storage, particularly on laptops and also among many folks in the server world. As with any new technology, as it is introduced we often need to revisit the assumptions baked into the overall system (OS, device support,…

Greetings! Based on the data we’re seeing we know a lot of folks on MSDN/TechNet/Connect are probably busy using the RC (Release Candidate) for Windows 7. Thank you!!! And of course many folks are looking forward to downloading the RC and using it as we expand the downloads—we’re looking forward to the participation and seeing…

As mentioned before on this blog (regarding our UAC changes) and on the IE blog (regarding the SmartScreen® filter for malware), we have an increased focus to enable customers to be in control and feel confident about the software that they choose to run on their computers. Folks on this blog have also commented about…

One of the areas of any release of Windows that receives a significant amount of testing and scrutiny is the performance of graphics—desktop graphics all the way to the most extreme CAD and game graphics. The amazing breadth of hardware supported for Windows and the broad spectrum of usage scenarios contributes to a vibrant ecosystem…

There’s a strong community of developers who take advantage of the ink input/TabletPC functionality to develop unique solutions for specific markets (medicine, education, line of business) and create software in Windows that builds on this experience to streamline how these end-users interact with information on their PC (usually with unique form-factors such as slates or…

This is a little bit of a tricky post to write because we’re going to be asking everyone using our Windows 7 Beta to help us out, but doing so is going to take a little time and require a bit of a commitment to helping test the next milestone. This has been a remarkably…

We’ve come a long way in engineering Windows 7 since we first provided an engineering preview of Windows 7 and the work we are doing to support the touch interface paradigm back at the D: All Things Digital conference. We chose to kick-off the discussion about engineering Windows 7 with touch scenarios because we know…

The Windows Explorer has evolved by enabling you to find all sorts of content by searching for it. Many of you have used the search features in Windows Vista (based on our instrumented data) from the start menu or from the search box in Explorer. It has been a long time since most of us…

Here’s a behind the scenes look at the design of the Aero Snap feature in Windows 7. We thought it would be fun to take a look at the overall design process of the feature and the tools and techniques used. This feature poses a unique design challenge in that you just use the feature…

Hey folks, just wanted to provide another update (building on the recent post on some changes since Beta) on some of the changes you will see in the Release Candidate. Again, there are many and this is not an exhaustive list. Of course we continue to gather telemetry from the large number of people running…